Some Teenage Girls in America Are Resorting to Sex Work to Afford Food

In the poorest communities in America, hungry teenagers are resorting to sex work to afford food.

That’s one startling insight revealed in a new study from the Urban Institute, which tried to understand the coping strategies low-income teens use when they’re worried they might not have enough to eat.

An estimated 6.8 million young people in America struggle with food security, meaning that they’re never quite sure they’ll have enough to eat at their next meal. And according to this study, which included focus groups of 193 teenagers in 10 low-income communities, food-insecure teens are forced to adopt some distressing coping strategies.

Many use familiar methods: skipping meals, saving their school lunch for the evening so they won’t be too hungry to sleep at night, visiting a friend’s house around mealtime in the hopes of being invited to eat.

But some teens go further to feed themselves and help their families make ends meet: shoplifting, stealing, and drug-dealing are common. And food insecurity makes teenage girls more vulnerable to sexual exploitation—sometimes they resort to prostitution and sex work outright, but often they engage in what the study calls "transactional dating." A girl goes on dates and has sex with a man—often someone much older than them—in exchange for meals and gifts. Teens discussed this practice in all 10 communities surveyed.

“It’s really like selling yourself,” a girl in Portland, Ore., told the researchers. "You’ll do whatever you need to do to get money or eat."

These insights would be heart-wrenching coming from teens from anywhere, but they're especially jarring since these young people live in America, the richest country in the world. To help address the problem, the Urban Institute recommends that nonprofits and federal programs designed to help low-income people access food tweak their policies to better address the needs of teens. Many food programs are geared toward young children who are at critical stages in their development, or parents who are thought to be making purchasing decisions for the whole family. But as this study shows, teens are acutely aware of the pressures forced on their families by poverty, and will take steps—sometimes harmful ones—to try to relieve that pressure.